Chapter III

Oh then, a wreath! Let’s
refresh something they
used to write well of.

Two fern plumes. Strip them
to the mid-rib along one side.
Bind the tips with a grass stem.
Bend and intertwist the stalks
at the back. So!
Ah! now we are crowned!
Now we are a poet!

Quickly!
A bunch of little flowers
for Flossie--the little ones
only:
a red clover, one
blue heal-all, a sprig of
bone-set, one primrose,
a head of Indian tobacco, this
magenta speck and this
little lavender!
Home now, my mind!--
Sonny’s arms are icy, I tell you--
and have breakfast!

EL HOMBRE

It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

HERO

Fool,
put your adventures
into those things
which break ships--
not female flesh.

Let there pass
over the mind
the waters of
four oceans, the airs
of four skies!

Return hollow-bellied,
keen-eyed, hard!
A simple scar or two.

Little girls will come
bringing you
roses for your button-hole.

LIBERTAD! IGUALDAD! FRATERNIDAD!

You sullen pig of a man
you force me into the mud
with your stinking ash-cart!

Brother!
--if we were rich
we’d stick our chests out
and hold our heads high!

It is dreams that have destroyed us.

There is no more pride
in horses or in rein holding.
We sit hunched together brooding
our fate.

Well--
all things turn bitter in the end
whether you choose the right or
the left way
and--
dreams are not a bad thing.

CANTHARA

The old black-man showed me
how he had been shocked
in his youth
by six women, dancing
a set-dance, stark naked below
the skirts raised round
their breasts:
bellies flung forward
knees flying!
--while
his gestures, against the
tiled wall of the dingy bath-room,
swished with ecstasy to
the familiar music of
his old emotion.

MUJER

Oh, black Persian cat!
Was not your life
already cursed with offspring?

We took you for rest to that old
Yankee farm,--so lonely
and with so many field mice
in the long grass--
and you return to us
in this condition--!

Oh, black Persian cat.

SUMMER SONG

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,--
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,--
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky blue
where would they carry me?

LOVE SONG

Sweep the house clean,
hang fresh curtains
in the windows
put on a new dress
and come with me!
The elm is scattering
its little loaves
of sweet smells
from a white sky!

Who shall hear of us
in the time to come?
Let him say there was
a burst of fragrance
from black branches.

FOREIGN

Artsybashev is a Russian.
I am an American.
Let us wonder, my townspeople,
if Artsybashev tends his own fires
as I do, gets himself cursed
for the baby’s failure to thrive,
loosens windows for the woman
who cleans his parlor--
or has he neat servants
and a quiet library, an
intellectual wife perhaps and
no children,--an apartment
somewhere in a back street or
lives alone or with his mother
or sister--

I wonder, my townspeople,
if Artsybashev looks upon
himself the more concernedly
or succeeds any better than I
in laying the world.

I wonder which is the bigger
fool in his own mind.

These are shining topics
my townspeople but--
hardly of great moment.

A PRELUDE

I know only the bare rocks of today.
In these lies my brown sea-weed,--
green quartz veins bent through the wet shale;
in these lie my pools left by the tide--
quiet, forgetting waves;
on these stiffen white star fish;
on these I slip bare footed!

Whispers of the fishy air touch my body;
“Sisters,” I say to them.

HISTORY

I.

A wind might blow a lotus petal
over the pyramids--but not this wind.

Summer is a dried leaf.

Leaves stir this way then that
on the baked asphalt, the wheels
of motor cars rush over them,--
gas smells mingle with leaf smells.

Oh, Sunday, day of worship!!!

The steps to the museum are high.
Worshippers pass in and out.
Nobody comes here today.
I come here to mingle faiance dug
from the tomb, turquoise colored
necklaces and belched wind from the
stomach; delicately veined basins
of agate, cracked and discolored and
the stink of stale urine!

Enter! Elbow in at the door.
Men? Women?
Simpering, clay fetish-faces counting
through the turnstile.
Ah!